Abbeys & Priories

As mentioned earlier on the home page of this site, there are many abbeys and priories, built between the Conquest and Dissolution, which demonstrate similar characteristics of strength, grace, exuberance and awe-inspiring scale as the cathedrals that feature here that survive in whole or part today, but which never achieved cathedral status: I have included images from a few noteworthy examples in this gallery.

These examples range from churches that survive gloriously intact from the middle-ages, such as Tewkesbury; those which suffered serious damage at the time of the Dissolution, but where local communities rescued and preserved a part of them to serve as their parish church, such as at Pershore, Malmesbury, and St Bartholomew the Great in London; and, finally, those that suffered major damage at the Dissolution and subsequently were abandoned and decayed, yet where enough of the structure remains today, over 450 years later, to illustrate the glory of what once existed, such as at Fountains, Jedburgh, Melrose and Dunfermline.